Searchin’ for Cinema

After checking out my colleague Ben Greenman’s reference-book playlist, I put my two cents in with a glance back to my untimely early-teen kick, doo-wop, for “Book of Love,” and then went to the sidebar recommendation—the Coasters, doing “Searchin’,” which, if not quite on theme (the singers are “gonna find her,” a search beyond the scope of encyclopedias), is a cooler and wilder musical thrill, a blend of hypnotic-erotic rhythmic obsession and a wailing blues drag.

But as I watched the clip, my eye was caught by the incisive three-dimensional diagonal of the framing—the way it highlights both the lead singer’s insinuating stage attitude (catch his sidelong glances offstage) and the group’s percussive motion (and note the delicate imbalance that comes from him snapping fingers with his left hand while the others use the right), the aptly timed dolly in (at 1:10) and back (toward the end)—and by the fact that the performance unfolds in a single long take. It felt like an image trouvée in which Busby Berkeley meets Jean-Marie Straub and Dani&#232le Huillet. And then I watched it again and my astonishment increased: the host, Steve Allen, is part of the same continuous shot: he shuffles off-screen as the curtain parts behind him to reveal three Coasters already in action, juking toward camera and taking their places—while the lead singer, Carl Gardner, comes in from the other side of the frame toward the foreground. Here, for the span of two minutes and sixteen seconds, the director, the choreographer, the set designer (note the unseen pedestals) and the camera operator—forgotten craftspeople of the early television industry—were artistic geniuses, creators of the highest order.

Last summer, in this space, we were discussing mise en scène and whether the term means anything at all; well, if I needed to define it—as the exquisite use of space over time to capture motion in a way that goes beyond dramatic content to provoke a complex, quasi-transcendent emotional effect (or, to use a camera in a narrative or documentary context as if it were a musical instrument)—I could hardly do better than to show this clip.